


Apples Peaches Pumpkin Pie

by raja815



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Language Kink, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-15
Updated: 2012-04-15
Packaged: 2017-11-16 21:45:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raja815/pseuds/raja815
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Have you realized the time we're spending in exile is the longest you and I have spent together since we sat on Kirk's bridge all those years ago?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apples Peaches Pumpkin Pie

**Author's Note:**

> Set between _The Search for Spock_ and _The Voyage Home_. Written to fill some personal canon, namely that when the crew was hanging around on Vulcan together, all the feeeelings left over from the original five year mission came flooding back and everyone fell in love. (What is it about Trek that brings out the romantic in me?) Originally meant as a triptych of short pieces, but of course, this one got away from me. Possibly, the remaining two pieces (concerning the remaining crew members) will follow at a later date.
> 
> Laregly inspired by, and titled after, [Apples Peaches Pumpkin Pie](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaENxilZe60&feature=related) by Jay and the Techniques.
> 
> Notes/translations on the non-English phrases used follow the story, if you need/want them.

Pavel is sitting in the puddle of shade beneath an overcropping of rocks, staring out at the Vulcan landscape. It's hot as Hell, even in the shade, and there's nothing to see but red: red rocks, red sun, red sky, red sand... all in all, it reminds him in no way of Russia, and he's a bit abashed to admit even to himself that despite this, he finds the planet beautiful.

He came out here, data padd in hand, to look at the Klingon ship schematics, trying to get a feel for the alien navigation systems. It may be hot out here, but he prefers the heat of outdoors to the oppressiveness of the Vulcan building they've been working out of. Even when the Vulcans aren't around, he feels their disquietingly expressionless eyes on him whenever he steps inside. He doesn’t care for their way of staring. Even when it had only been Mr. Spock, a Vulcan he had come to like immensely, Pavel had never quite trusted that unwavering gaze. He doesn't like to acknowledge how much it still unnerves him.

Besides, out here lacks the mixed babble of Standard and Vulcan languages that hovers around more populated areas, and in the desert silence, his mind is clear enough to think in Russian. He always does his best thinking in Russian.

Pity he can't drag his eyes away from the landscape.

He's just promising himself that he'll get back to work when the shade has stretched beyond the small sand dune eighty meters due ahead, when from behind him he hears the unmistakable crunch of a footstep in sand.

" _Приве Т,_ Pavel."

And he answers, without turning, without even thinking, like a reflex.

" _おっす,_ Hikaru."

Pavel can all but hear Hiker’s answering smile, and when he turns to face him, his insight is confirmed.

"Hi, Pavel," Hikaru repeats, in Standard this time, as he seats himself beside Pavel on the rock.

It's a callback to a game they'd once played, Pavel remembers, when they'd sat together on the bridge of the Enterprise all those years ago. On the slow days, of course, they'd only played on slow days, when there'd been no space anomalies or asteroid belts or murderous invading aliens, when there'd been nothing but endless hours of _steady as she goes_ and infinite stars streaming by on the viewscreen. One of them--usually Hikaru, it had almost always been Hikaru who started it--would whisper a word in Standard, so only they could hear. Pavel would reply with a Russian equivalent, Hikaru with one in Japanese, then so on again and again, adding new words and repeating old, constructing complex strings of language, until neither of them could think of more synonyms. It had started off as a joke (their first round had ended with a nearly two hundred word long list of slang terms for "penis”) but eventually they'd done it enough that they could converse a little, each in the other's native language. It had been the simplest and most effective language course Pavel had ever encountered, with the added benefit of the ability to share short, private bursts of cross-cultural swearing whenever the inevitable anomaly or asteroid or alien butted in and ruined their game. Pavel had always loved it.

"Thought I might find you out here," Hikaru says.

"You were always wery good at finding things," Pavel concedes, "though newer good as me, of course. I am best at finding things."

Hikaru smiles, indulgently, and his lips stretch thin and his eyes go soft. "Next you'll be telling me the simple practice of hunting down lost things was an art perfected in Russia."

"It was. You have heard of Catholic Saint Anthony, patron saint of things that are lost? He was Russian citizen."

"Funny, I always heard he was Portuguese."

Pavel shook his head. "You were lied to, my friend. All the best people are Russian."

"All of them, Pavel?"

Pavel turns to face his friend just as Hikaru reaches for him, pressing a hand briefly against the younger man's forearm, just long enough to make goosebumps erupt from the point of contact, before settling his hands elegantly over his own lap.

Pavel shivers. This had been a game, too. Somewhere around the time they'd progressed from lists of expletives to lists of informal endearments, they'd started an ongoing challenge of surreptitious touching. A toe to the sole of a boot while they watched the endless gulfs of space surge by, a hand to the shoulder while the Captain's attention was centered wholly on the science station and Mr. Spock bent over it, fingers cupping the back of a neck and brushing at the hairline while Hikaru manned the captain's chair on boring gamma shifts... No one else had ever commented on it, except for Lieutenant Riley, who had laughed and called it the most drawn-out, high-stakes game of gay chicken he'd ever encountered.

He wasn't too far off the mark. The game had culminated one day in the fourth year of their mission when the Captain, First Officer, and most of the other senior staff had been debriefing in the ready room off the bridge. The helmsman had turned in his chair, caught the navigator's chin in hand and brought their mouths together in a far too brief kiss that flickered with the green-and-gold light from the planet on the viewscreen. The day had finished with the navigator on his back in the helmsman's quarters after shift, drunk on two glasses of replicated vodka, one carafe of replicated _sake_ , the fresh oxygen from all the potted plants in the little room, and the sight of helmsman above him, sheathed to the hilt, sweating and panting and completely undone.

Pavel doesn't realize he's become lost, wandering through the mire of the old memories, until Hikaru touches him again. The knee this time. The goosebumps multiply.

Without a pause to think it through (for the best officers are those who can act automatically, and everyone knows the best officers in Starfleet are Russian) Pavel reaches for him, and brushes his fingers over Hikaru's wrist.

"Perhaps not _all_ the best people are Russian," he concedes. Hikaru's skin is damp and sweaty, and a few stray grains of sand grit between their skin as Pavel strokes him. "I grant that is it possible. Possible, but sewerely unlikely."

That makes Hikaru laugh. "I missed this, you know. We used to do this for days on end."

"Of course. No one argues like a Russian."

"No. No, that's where you're wrong. It's that nobody argues like Pavel Chekov."

That's when Hikaru kisses him.

It's been a while since they last kissed, aside from a handful of brief, brotherly kisses of greeting, but it still feels familiar, like rediscovering some well-loved artifact of childhood perfectly preserved in an attic. They fall into place, bodies folding together into the old patterns, fingers finding old favorite spots, until Pavel's mind sings with the joy of _I remember, I remember, I remember..._

"It is unconwentional method of winning argument," Pavel mutters, when they slide apart a few moments later. Hikaru smiles, and pointedly does not remove his hand from Pavel’s knee.

"When was the crew of the Enterprise ever conventional? As long as we get our results, no one questions our methods. And here's my result. I have you here with me, and you can't run away again."

"When have I ever run from you?"

"For the past fifteen years. You run pretty fast. For a Russian."

The stab of guilt is enough that he doesn't rise to the barb.

"That is not true, I have always endewored--"

"Please. You and your timelines. Two years here, four years there, and it was always, ’oh, Hikaru, maybe after this next mission, we will settle down, maybe after I make next pay grade, maybe after I make Commander...’ You made a pretty good show of it, there for awhile."

"I always made time to see you." Of course he had, there'd been the tediously synchronized shore leaves, the weekend hiking trips, the two weeks they'd spent at the resort on Risa over Hikaru's fortieth birthday...

But of course, it had never been quite the same as it was. He can admit that.

And now, too, he can admit how much he has missed it.

"I...newer forgot about you," he finishes. It’s not really an apology, but somehow, it feels like one. An apology, or maybe a confession.

"No. And I never forgot about you."

Hikaru's smile doesn't fade exactly, but something creeps into it, taints the edges of it with something bitter, like corrosion on a copper dilithium converter panel. Despite the Vulcan sand swirling about his feet in a gust of hot wind, Pavel feels a touch of coldness in his stomach.

"You _thought_ I'd forget you," Hikaru continues, when the coldness in Pavel's stomach precludes his own reply. "Hell, _I_ thought I'd forget you. Just a space fling, right, something to kill the time on off-duty hours? But I never could. No matter what. Not when I was with Moeko, not when Demora was born, sure as hell not with anyone else. It always came back to you, to the kid I left behind when we finished that goddamn five year tour."

"Hikaru," he starts, suddenly desperate to explain, "I was a young man, I was--"

"Of course you were. We were all young men. And young men stuck on five year missions sometimes do stupid things."

" _не Т, неТ_, I--"

"Stupid things," he continues as if uninterrupted, "like falling in love with a little Russian ensign who's too adorable for his own damn good."

He kisses him, almost sweetly, and his mouth is as cool and wet as an oasis in the dusty Vulcan desert air.

"But we are no longer young men, Hikaru," Pavel says, when his mouth is free again. "And yet, here we are, deserters stuck in Wulcan exile because we cannot forget our old loyalties to our crew. Perhaps young men are not only ones who do stupid things."

And Hikaru smiles, smug and rich, and kisses a line from Pavel's mouth to his ear as he crushes his arms around Pavel's shoulders.

"Bullshit. Deserting Starfleet was the smartest thing I ever did," Hikaru whispers, breath warm and moist against the shell of Pavel's ear. It should be too hot for comfort in the Vulcan air, but somehow it is not. "Have you realized, the time we're spending in exile on this goddamn desert is the longest you and I have spent together since we sat on Kirk's bridge all those years ago?"

"Yes." He has realized it. He's realizing it more and more with each passing second, the way the barriers are falling, the way the world seems to be righting itself, falling back into the recognizable order of the five years when the crew of the Enterprise had been his whole world, and a perfect one at that. "I have noticed."

Hikaru kisses him again. "Good. Because you won't get away this time. There's no new orders for you to hide behind, no Starfleet to whisk you away. And even if you try, I won't let you. I can pilot a goddamn Klingon warbird now; there's not a ship in the Fleet I can't fly on sight. You run to the ends of the galaxy and I'll find you, anywhere you go, I'll be at the helm, nipping at your toes until I have you again."

"You are forgetting important fact."

"What?"

"A Russian never surrenders."

For a moment, Hikaru is silent... And then he bursts into rich laughter that echoes off the tall, red cliffs that surround them.

" _Я Тебя люблю, _ Pavel. Always."

" _愛してる,_ Hikaru."

The pilot's eyebrows rise, and his mouth quirks into the saucy smile that Pavel likes best.

"I don't know, _愛_ is pretty serious stuff in Japanese. You probably want to say _好きだ. 大好きだ,_ if you're really serious."

"I know what I said," Pavel scolds. "You were wery good teacher. Not as good as me, but wery good all the same. Eweryone knows Russians are best teachers."

"How can they be, when they still have so much to learn?"

And he presses him down against the rock, slides his hands under the breezy Vulcan clothing they've been given for daily wear, and presses their bodies and their mouths together.

They stay that way, a delicate spot of coolness in the infinite plain of heat, as the shade grows darker around them and the red sky of Vulcan begins to deepen into its glowing sunset pink.

 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Translation notes:
> 
> Russian:  
>  _Приве Т_ \- (privét) Informal greeting  
>  _не Т_ \- (nyet) No  
>  _Я Тебя люблю_ \- (ja tebjá ljubljú) A very intimate 'I love you'
> 
> Japanese:  
>  _おっす_ \- (ossu) Informal greeting, usually used between male friends  
>  _愛してる_ \- (aishiteru) Very, very powerful 'I love you.' Something you should only use with your spouse if at all. (I've never heard anyone say it IRL, and I live in Japan.)  
>  _愛_ \- (ai) Love; general feeling of love (the nuance is more like 'real' love, or unselfish love)  
>  _好きだ_ \- (suki da) A more casual 'I love you,'or 'I like you.' This is how you usually tell someone you love them in Japanese.  
>  _大好きだ_ \- (daisuki da) "I love you very much." Basically the same nuance as above, only to a stronger degree.
> 
>  
> 
> (Now, I'm basically an absolute beginner at Russian, and though I've been studying Japanese for a number of years now, I am still in no way fluent, so please, please, if you feel I'm in error with any of my foreign language choices, feel free to enlighten me! I'm always happy to learn. <3)


End file.
